Nikolay Durov. Biography of less famous brother

It's no secret that one of the most popular resources not only in Russia, but also in the entire post-Soviet space is the "VC". The social network "VKontakte" was founded in 2006 by the brothers Pavel and Nikolai Durov. On the Internet there is a lot of information about the younger brother - Paul, but the younger one obviously does not have enough.

A family

Pavel and Nikolai Durov were born into a family of intellectuals. Father of brothers - Valery Semenovich - Doctor of Philology, Head of the Department of Classical Philology of St. Petersburg State University. Grandfather, Semyon Petrovich Telyakov, took part in the Second World War. He fought on the Leningrad front, received three wounds. After the end of the war, he was repressed.

Nikolay Durov

Nikolai Valerievich Durov was born on November 21, 1980. In general, many believe that Nikolai is only in the shadow of his commercially more effective brother. Programming "modest genius" began to deal with seven years of age. In 1996-1998, Nikolay Durov took part in the olympiad in mathematics at the international level, where he won gold medals three times in a row. Along the way, he participated in the International Olympiad in Informatics, where he also demonstrated significant success, winning three silver and one gold medal. Nikolay was a team of programmers who won international competitions in 2000 and 2001. In 2005 he defended his doctoral dissertation under the leadership of Sergei Vostokov. Then he continued his mathematical education at Bonn University, where he subsequently received his doctorate.

Career

Nikolai Durov defended his thesis on "A new approach to the geometry of Arakelov." Later I worked in this direction. He holds the position of chief researcher in the laboratory of algebra at the St. Petersburg University.

From the very beginning he took part in the development of the "VC". The social network has become successful largely thanks to Nicholas. In the team, he was the lead developer. Left the post in 2013.

Developed the encryption protocol for MTProto correspondence, which is used in the Telegram messenger.

Pavel Durov

Among Internet users, of course, the younger Durov is more popular. Paul's biography is much more famous. He was born on October 10, 1981 in Leningrad. In the first class Pasha went to Turin, where at that time his father worked. Returning to his homeland, he studied a bit in an ordinary school. I entered the Academic Gymnasium, where there was the deepest immersion in the material. Pavel began to show interest in computers and programming at eleven. An interesting fact is that Durov changed the background on all computers, exposing the teacher's image in computer science with the inscription "Must die." After that, Pavel was banned from access to the PC, but it was not difficult for him to crack passwords. After graduating with honors from the gymnasium in 2001, Durov entered St. Petersburg State University with a degree in English Philology and Translation. For good studies, Pavel was awarded a scholarship of the Russian Federation and the President of the Russian Federation. He graduated from the Durov school in 2006, receiving a red diploma, but so far he has not taken it.

"In contact with"

In his student years Pavel Durov created several projects that were aimed at enabling students to communicate with each other. One way or another, everything that was created could not satisfy Paul's requests. In 2006, a friend of Paul, who came from America, told him about the Facebook project, which was based on real questionnaires and photos of users. Durov liked the idea, and he decided to develop a similar project for the Runet. The domain of the future resource was registered on October 1, 2006, at this stage Nikolay Durov took part. Until the end of the year, the social network was in the process of testing, and from December it was opened for public access. In RuNet, the resource became the largest project. To date, attendance is more than 300 million users per month, and the turnover of money - 4.3 billion rubles. On January 24, 2014, the public learned that Durov had sold 12% of VKontakte's shares to Ivan Tavrin in December 2013 and stopped exercising the powers of the owner of the network.

April 16, 2014 Durov announced information that in December, FSB agents urgently asked the network owners to provide personal information to the organizers of EuroMaidan. On this demand Paul refused and in the same month sold his share. Soon Durov went abroad and, as it became known later, is not going to return back.

Telegram

Telegram is a free instant messenger developed for Android and other devices. As Pavel Durov said in an interview, the idea to create an application visited him as early as 2011, when special troops were at his door. After their departure, Pavel immediately called Nikolay and realized that he did not have a reliable and secure way of communicating with his brother. Subsequently, Nikolay Durov developed a new encryption protocol MTProto, which was the basis for the messenger. As of mid-2015, the number of active users was more than 62 million people. By popularity, the application surpassed even the competitor from Facebook, and in February 2014 it became one of the most downloaded applications in the App Store.

Interesting Facts

• In November 2012, the book of Nikolai Kononov "The Code of Durov" was published. In the center of the story is the foundation of the social network "VKontakte", the main character is Pavel Durov. The biography and other information presented in the book is based on numerous interviews and facts.
• The organization AR Films bought the rights to film the book "Code of Durov". The release of the film was expected in 2014. Durov himself was negative about the idea of shooting a picture.
• The "VKontakte" logo was created by Pavel Durov in a couple of minutes using the Tahoma font.

You can treat the Durov brothers differently, but you can not overlook their contribution to the development of the Russian-speaking Internet segment. Although "VKontakte" already belongs to other owners for a long time, most users did not forget the first owner. Whatever one may say, Durovs have great knowledge and skills, which is confirmed by their new projects.